Jocelyn Elders, surgeon general under President Bill Clinton, once scornfully spoke of conservatives' "love affair with the fetus."

That conservatives would be so disposed to cherish life is perplexing to liberals. But to conservatives, the love affair between liberals and death is a strange one, indeed.

Recently, this love affair became manifest during the passage of congressional legislation banning partial-birth abortions — brutal assaults on the bodies of women and their unborn babies. Partial-birth abortion is euphemistically referred to as a "medical procedure," when in fact it is nothing of the sort.

As to be expected, the reaction from liberals was swift, hostile — and dishonest. Said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), "For the first time in history, Congress is banning a medical procedure that is considered medically necessary by physicians. This is a radical, radical thing that is about to happen."

But a reasoned analysis indicates otherwise. The American Medical Association has said that partial-birth abortion is never justifiable, and in order for the doctor to perform this butchery he must mechanically induce a breech delivery, subjecting the mother to considerably more stress than would a normal delivery.

Breech deliveries in times past were a death sentence for both mother and baby. In the 19th Century, a breech birth with rare exception resulted in the loss of each.

Furthermore, if it is necessary to perform this barbarism in order to preserve the mother's health, why is her health not endangered when the baby is 80% delivered, at which time it is hellishly slaughtered?

Those who support abortion, especially the grisly partial-birth kind, are satisfied only with the baby's death. This simply is blood lust. Consider this WorldNetDaily description of a video providing instruction for this most abominable act:

"Calmly and dispassionately describing each step of the process — up to and including the insertion of the scissors into the base of the baby's head, followed by the sound of the suction machine sucking out the baby's brain — [abortion doctor Martin] Haskell walks his audience through the procedure that opponents hope will finally be banned during this congressional session.

"At the end of the procedure, after the late-term, fully developed unborn child's life has been violently and painfully terminated, the audience breaks out into applause."

This is the moral void into which modern liberalism has descended: The killing of a baby, "calmly and dispassionately" described, is cause for celebration.

We even have reached a point to where an Illinois Circuit Court judge ruled that a fully-born baby, outside the mother's body, may be killed as long as the umbilical cord remains uncut, because in such a condition the baby has not yet "established a separate and independent life."

The more extreme of those who embrace death, such as Princeton University professor and "ethicist" Peter Singer, even advocate a 28-day waiting period after the birth of a baby, during which the parents may have her lawfully killed if they find her defective.

If you think that never will happen, cannot happen, consider how Americans would have reacted 30 years ago to partial-birth abortions, babies born alive in botched abortions and left to die or be drowned by doctors, and judges ruling that a baby outside her mother's womb may be killed if the umbilical cord is uncut.

But why have leftists and Democrats so zealously aligned themselves with the culture of death? Perhaps the answer lies in the Bible. Once the left assiduously ridded itself of everything Christian, could it be that, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "…God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts… [and] …to shameful lusts"?

Liberals have so divorced themselves from objective morality, are so unable to tell right from wrong, and so stifle open debate on great moral issues on college campuses that what is unthinkable today has a disquieting way of becoming very thinkable tomorrow.

This is the low estate of liberalism in 21st Century America. Life is continually devalued. The thirst for death seems unquenchable. The stories become more horrific on a seemingly daily basis.

It is reminiscent of a time and place in the last century. The time was the late 1930s. The place was Germany. Abortion and the killing of undesirables were commonplace. The perpetrators were socialists, committed to government control over almost every aspect of society. They were called Nazis and they were led by a man named Adolf Hitler.

What they espoused then was despicable and unfathomably destructive, its consequences unimaginably horrific. It is equally so today.